Capturing Opportunities for Leadership

by Ellen Hume

This essay was featured in True to Ourselves: A Celebration of Women Making a Difference, a publication of the League of Women Voters. (Copyright 1998, Jossey-Bass Publishers.)

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But what sealed the deal was much more serious. I read The Diary of Anne Frank and at the same time learned about Quaker and other religious teachings to bear witness to the world. These powerful influences came together convincing me that if we were more vigilant and vocal, evils like the Holocaust might be prevented next time. We could at least ensure that never again could people say they "didn't know" what was happening to their neighbors.

So the hope was that I, as a reporter, could make a positive difference. If one were in the right place at the right time, one could help expose crooks and honor unsung heroes. One could be the eyes and ears of the "little guy," helping empower people with information they otherwise wouldn't know.

I knew that in order to do the job well, I would have to give up certain things. We would strive to be "objective," abandoning any right to advocate a particular set of ideas or policy approaches as we covered an issue. We would try to give everyone a fair hearing, and leave it to the public and the politicians to follow up on the facts that we had gathered. That was how democracy was supposed to work.

My ideals collided immediately with harsh realities. As I searched for my first job, it seemed that the world didn't want to be saved -- at least not by me. The man at Associated Press had a job opening, but he took one look at me and said, "Forget it." He couldn't hire a woman. "You'll be attacked on the streets of Boston," he said, adding that I also would be scooped by our chief rivals at United Press International at some point because I'd get a flat tire on the way to a story and not know how to change it.

Fortunately I didn't give up. I found myself a reporting job nine months later at the weekly Somerville Journal, which launched my journalism career. I learned how to change a tire and studied karate. I resolved to go back and break that AP man's desk in two after I changed his tires, but he retired before I got the chance.

How Things Really Worked

It is hard to remember now, as women openly exercise their influence all across America, how circumscribed most of us were as we came of age thirty years ago. We had been told by our Harvard professors that we were the future leaders of the world. But when we graduated in 1968, it became clear that they were talking only to the men. Discrimination on the basis of race and sex was the norm in virtually every institution.

The women's movement had not yet awakened us to our own potential. A young black leader fighting for racial justice said derisively that the best position for women in the civil rights movement was "prone." The phrases "affirmative action" and "sexual harassment" were not in our vocabularies. It was almost impossible to be taken seriously, whether you were a traditional mother, a would-be career woman, or -- horrors! -- combining the two.

It's not surprising, then, that many of us were crippled by self-doubt. We thought women would never be able to win Rhodes scholarships, become partners at big law firms, or even get their own credit cards and mortgages.

We were supposed to be the loyal shadows to the men in power. We didn't dare to hope that they would change the baby's diapers, but we did wish they would let us finish our sentences. There was a sort of grim humor about it all, as actress Lee Grant illustrated when she observed in the 1970s that she'd been "married to one Fascist and one Marxist and neither one would take the garbage out."

It might have been easy to conclude that politics was irrelevant to us, since the power belonged to the men. It was tempting to believe that nothing would ever change for the better anyway, so why bother to try? But fortunately, some women and men didn't accept that idea.

These women and men led the legal and political battles that enlarged our civil rights laws in the 1960s and 1970s. The public arena began to offer women and minorities real opportunities for diverse contributions. American culture was changed dramatically because some people took a chance on making a difference. So I came to understand, firsthand, why politics mattered to me and to everyone. Unfortunately, others also taught me how politics can be a force for evil, rather than for progress.

Reporting Reality

As a Los Angeles Times reporter in the 1970s, I found myself covering some of the most bizarre political terrorism of our time, including the exploits of Sara Jane Moore, who narrowly failed in her assassination attempt against President Gerald Ford, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, a pathetic band of half a dozen middle-class suburban kids who thought that kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst would set off a revolution in America's black ghettos.

I doubt that more accurate and timely information could have persuaded them to take more reasonable approaches to injustice, for they surely must have been crazy as well as ill-informed. But I felt it was more important than ever to keep bearing witness to realities, in order for democracy to survive the paranoid fanatics. I found myself looking for stories about what works as well as what doesn't in American politics.

It remained very difficult, at times, to be the unbiased witness I was supposed to be. When I flew in the back of a cargo plane to Cambodia on Thanksgiving Day 1979, I was pressured in midair by the relief group sponsoring our flight to write "positive" stories about the relief shipments. Children were starving across Cambodia, they noted, and if I didn't write nice stories about the way the new Cambodian government was handling these emergency supplies, that government would cut off future shipments.

I had committed to being a reporter, not a relief worker, so I told them that I was going to stick with my original job and bear witness to whatever the true story had to be -- even if it resulted in a cutoff of aid to the children. Fortunately, the relief shipments worked well, so I never had to follow through on that terrible choice.

When I toured Phnom Penh's Tuol Sleng prison and saw the just-vacated torture chambers, the pits of bones, and the killing fields of Pol Pot's regime, which had just been ousted by this new Cambodian government, I learned again the core lesson: politics matters. We need witnesses to be sure everyone understands when things are going wrong, and why.

Everything that I learned in my journalism career was through trial and error, and I was very lucky that my mistakes didn't kill me; they made me stronger. Most of all, I trusted my instincts and protected my integrity. That meant I could sleep most nights, knowing that I was at least trying to do an honest job.

When I started, I had hoped to help citizens discover their own power to influence the events of our time. But too often we journalists ended up chasing the big splashy stories, rather than the ones that would truly make a difference.

Unlikely Sources

In the end the special contributions emerged mostly by accident, in small stories at unexpected moments -- like the day I was asked to write a feature story about a woman named Anais Uren, who had learned to paint with her toes after her hands became paralyzed by multiple sclerosis.

When I arrived at her nursing home, I was too late; she had gone blind and could no longer paint even with her toes. She was only fifty-six, and she looked like Ingrid Bergman. I stayed for a while by her bedside to talk. She couldn't see, her body was paralyzed, and it was hard to understand what she was saying. But she could still hear and feel and think.

She told me her life story, radiating spirit and courage. I went back to my office and wrote: "There are times when all of us have asked ourselves, why do we go on living? No one has asked it more often than Anais Uren." People read about her extraordinary survivor's spirit. They wrote her letters from all over the world. She touched peoples' lives, and they touched hers back.

This, then, was the most important lesson of all, taught to me by a blind and paralyzed woman who was at the end of her life. The opportunities for leadership arrive without warning, and sometimes very close to home.

You can't force your solutions onto an unwilling world, as the terrorists tried to do. You can't solve it all by yourself. But anyone can make a difference if she responds to a genuine opportunity to help. The invitation could come any day, just when you least expect it, from a most unlikely source.